State of Matter Exhibition

State of Matter: Exhibition at povvera, Philippistr 7, 14059 Berlin-Charlottenburg September 11-20, 2015

Artist Statement

“Every object is created within circumstances that are important and is distributed in ways that add to its meaning.” – Sarah Urist Green

A U.S. navy ship, an amphibious transport dock, made with a “symbolic amount of steel” from the ruins of the World Trade Center Towers.

The Panama Canal is at historically low water levels, restricting the draft of the vessels that can pass through it.

An oil fire in Kuwait, set by retreating Iraqi forces.

Siorapaluk, Greenland, the northernmost settlement of North America and Greenland, where subsistence hunters can no longer hunt due to the melting ice sheet.

Inspired by the way goods move and change shape around the world, the drawings explore the immediate and future implications of human action. Making drawings in a format that references traditional landscape painting, I explore the element of the sublime in an image that can be terrible yet aesthetically fascinating. By choosing to working in graphite on paper I reduce the image to basic elements: a complex detailed photograph has been reduced to broken lines and shading. Working with images found online, the subject matter gets translated and distanced from its original context: the digital picture is blown up, grainy and with elements simplified, altered or completely removed. This echoes the way the physical subject matter (a boat, an ice sheet) is itself altered.